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These are a few of my biggest pet peeves (June 19, 2013)

Reckless drivers, especially those that pass on the double yellow lines.

Rude people; there’s never an excuse for rudeness.

People that think the whole world revolves around them – they cut in front of you in check-out lanes, hog the arm rest at a movie and are just generally boorish, self-centered, histrionic people.

Cell phone conversations that are supposed to be private. Maybe this one falls under the rude and histrionic people.

Oprah had her favorite things; I’ve got my biggest pet peeves.

I know the curvy mountain roads seem to beckon for people to drive fast and do dangerous things just to prove how much power their car has. It makes me angry and scared at the same time. They are putting their lives and other people’s lives in jeopardy.

The 35 mph sign is probably there for a reason; not because the DOT ran out of 55 mph ones.

Nearly running people off the road and then passing two cars at once is a good way to either have an accident or to get a couple of points on your license.

There’s never a reason for rudeness. We all have bad days, we all have stuff happen that makes us irritated or stressed or upset – whatever the adjective is, it’s called life.

If you are so upset at work that you take a verbal swipe at a customer just because they are interrupting your bad day to do your job, maybe you need to take a break.

Same goes for those customers who basically go in a store looking for a fight with someone who’s maybe making minimum wage.

If it makes you happy to pick a fight with someone, stay home. You’ll find your worthiest opponent looking back at you in the mirror.

Self-absorbed people are everywhere – but may not be necessarily rude. I think the rudeness stems from people knowing they are being a jerkwagon and go out of their way to do so.

The self-absorbed people are just so ignorant to anyone else but themselves. They just needed to get that carton of orange juice right then. Didn’t matter that I had been standing there waiting for the little old man with his oxygen tank to finish getting his juice – they needed juice right then and by golly, they are important. Why should I think it was my turn just because I had been there second?

They are usually the ones that when you are checking out they push their cart into you as they try to get right up beside you while you enter your pin as you finish your purchase. It’s as if to say “Hey, I am important and I need to get my Kashi. You get out of my way.”

Of course, I may be seen as rude or self- absorbed when I bump their cart back on them with a polite smile as I say “Oh, oops. You must not have seen I was still here.”

And we’ve all had the privilege of hearing someone’s cell phone conversation that we wish we could un-hear.

The details of someone’s horrific date, the colonoscopy that went horribly wrong. All things that we are quite certain are not supposed to be for the general public but are.

I don’t know why the NSA, or whatever group it was, decided to monitor cell phone conversations and e-mails; all they would have to do is hang out in a public place long enough and they would hear more than they wanted.

For some reason, people like to have those private cell phone conversations during occasions that are highly inconvenient, like getting their nails done, and tend to be incredibly annoyed by their manicurist who is asking for the hand holding the phone.

If the conversation was so important that you had to talk right then, maybe you should have waited until after it was finished before you sat down to get a fill-in on your acrylics. And we weren’t eavesdropping, especially when your voice went up three octaves to make sure we all heard about the cruise you were taking in two weeks to show off your new tummy tuck. Too bad the doctor didn’t throw in a cranial-posterior extraction for free.

I even feel snarky and rude for complaining about these things.

Do these things annoy other people or just me? Sometimes it seems like I look around and the majority of people are doing these things, often multiple offenses at once.

Maybe I am being hypersensitive to these offenses, finding them to be more irritating than they truly are. Or perhaps it’s a matter of age and I have turned into an extreme fuddy-duddy.

I ponder this thought as I attempt to check out at the grocery store. My groceries were still being scanned when a woman, on her cell phone, pushes her cart into my hip as she starts throwing her groceries up on the belt.

Sweet son of a biscuit eater – the only peeve missing was her being a reckless driver and if the way she handled a buggy was any indication, I bet there was a SUV out there with some worn out tire tread.

“I mean – can you believe some people?” she said into her phone. “It was as if she didn’t know we would know she had some work done.”

The cashier and I exchanged perplexed looks.

Hypersensitive or fuddy-duddy be darned, I had had enough. I bumped the woman’s buggy back into her legs which caused her to shriek.

“Hey!”

“Sorry – you bumped me first and I am still checking out my groceries. Here’s your Lean Cuisines you tossed up there with my Frosted Mini-wheat’s.”